Reef Fish Seek Noise When House Hunting

April 7, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) — Silence is not golden for young fish who prefer to call home a reef situated in a noisy locale.

Between shrimp clacking their claws, the grinding of teeth and other fishy sounds, reefs can be noisy places, and juvenile fish returning from the open ocean gravitate to the din, according to a study published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

After hatching on a reef, many fish drift out to sea where they mature and, once they become strong swimmers, return to reefs to live and breed.

A team of researchers led by Stephen D. Simpson of Edinburgh University in Scotland wanted to know how the fish find their way back.

Knowing that sound can travel for miles in water, they experimented to see if it attracted returning fish.

The researchers built 24 artificial reefs off the coast of Australia, leaving some silent and planting speakers in others to broadcast reef noise.

In the first test, reefs with sound collected 325 fish, compared to 108 in silent reefs. A second experiment had high-frequency noise, low-frequency noise and silent reefs. Reefs with high-frequency sounds collected 1,118 returning fish, the low-frequency reefs attracted 1,171 new arrivals and the silent reefs drew 657 fish.

The researchers say their finding raises the possibility there may be damaging effects from human-caused noise, such as that from shipping and drilling. In addition, however, the discovery may show fisheries managers a new way to attract fish to restock depleted areas.

The research was funded by the British Ecological Society, Fisheries Society of the British Isles, Marsden Fund of New Zealand and Australian Institute of Marine Science.